You can check out the Lemon Verbena Lady at her blog http://lemonverbenalady.blogspot.com.

The Herbal Husband, a friend from Peru and I took a train trip to New York City last week. I got to spend one of my days at the beautiful Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. In response to Letitia Star's blog, "Herbal Travels: Chicago Botanic Garden" (which I loved when we went on a cold, rainy and windy day in October), I would have to say that The Cloisters is my favorite walled garden.  Really, I probably should have been a medieval scholar or a horticulture major in college. I turned out to be an art history major and that has been very helpful in understanding the relationship between gardens and art. They are intermingled here quite masterfully.

The Trie Cloister Garden is home to a collection of plants native to the meadows, woodlands and stream banks of Europe. 

The plants grown here are found in the tapestries and artwork found inside the museum. The café surrounds this garden which is a very colorful garden in spring and by the heat of summer becomes a green garden. It was a restful retreat even on a cool day. I enjoyed the small sparrows drinking from the fountain.

In a monastery, a cloister is a square or rectangular courtyard surrounded by covered passageways. The yard enclosed within the arcades is known as a garth. The garth is situated to the south, providing the monks or nuns a place to enjoy nature without leaving the monastery or convent. The plan is typically medieval. A fountain is in the center of the crossed paths and divides the garden into quadrants. Each quadrant has a lawn and an apple tree. This garden is the ancestor of our ornamental gardens. In winter, the arcades of the cloister have glass to protect the tender plants from the winter cold and wind.

I loved the standards of myrtle, bay and the pots of dittany of crete.

I got to talk with the gardener who tends this garden. She was getting the garden ready to plant most of the herbs for the season. The plants are labeled in each bed according to their medieval uses such as cooking, medicine or magic, among others. Many plants had multiple uses and all were thought to have medicinal properties. The garden has raised beds, wattle fences and a wellhead. There are four quince trees at the center of the garden. Tender plants are grown in terracotta pots and moved inside in winter, a common practice in northern Europe throughout the late Middle Ages.

The Cloisters has family events going on during the summer. The other bonus of visiting The Cloisters is that you can visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art the same day for free. I took the bus and saw a slice of life in New York City. The Cloisters also has a blog called The Medieval Garden Enclosed, which gives an inside look at The Cloisters and its gardens. Hope you have a chance to take a road trip this summer and visit this herbal treasure!

It's truly a pleasure writing for The Herb Companion for the last three years. Incidentally, I also regularly contribute to two sister magazines of Ogden Publications–GRIT and Natural Home. To date, I've written over 1,000 published articles, including features on gardening, green living, travel, home design, sustainability, healthy cooking and good eating.  You can reach me at lstarart@gmail.com. 

I wish you could experience the English Walled Garden at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Illinois. It's particularly lovely in the spring and early summer. Blooming wisteria drapes over rows of trellised classical columns. Flowering fruit trees shimmer in the breeze.

And then there are herbs. Within this enchanted garden's six distinct "rooms", you'll delightfully discover herb plantings at every turn. In the English-gardening style, herbs are not segregated but thrive among flowers and shrubs. For example, hardneck garlic and triple-curled parsley sprout up near Canterbury Bells, Butterhead lettuce and Night-scented stock. Peek inside the classical urn and you'll observe Rowleaf oregano and cilantro along with California poppy and Tassel hyacinth.

A sign in the Checkerboard Garden requests: "Please step on stone paths, but not on the newly planted baby thymes." Sure enough, looking down you'll find woolly, creeping and lemon thymes serving as ground cover between the bricks. All of this can provide wonderful inspiration for your own garden.

Photo credit: Chicago Botanic Garden photo by Robin Carlson.

Rich Abundance for Herb Lovers

The English Walled Garden is just one of the 23 display gardens and three native habitats in the Chicago Botanic Garden–a 385-acre "living museum," which is part of invaluable conservation efforts in the Chicago area. If you are an herb enthusiast, you could easily spend the entire day here pursuing your passion for herbs.

Once when visiting the Chicago Botanic Garden, I struck up a conversation with a couple who turned out to be Herb Companion readers. It was enjoyable showing them the many herb plantings in the Heritage Garden, which is a replica of Europe's first botanic garden in Padua, Italy. Other gardens burgeoning with herbs include the Enabling Garden, the Sensory Garden, the Landscape Garden and the four-acre Fruit and Vegetable Garden. There's even creeping thyme in the Model Railroad Garden.

Here are more features I enjoyed at the English Walled Garden:   

• Free herb plants. Throughout July and August, receive complementary herb seedlings at the Fruit and Vegetable Garden.

• Free food demonstrations. A highlight of the 2009 Garden Chef Series is the Italian Cooking weekend on July 25 and 26.

• Free horticulture help. Even if you're not a member of the Chicago Botanic Garden, you can get expert advice regarding herb and other plant cultivation. Call (847) 835-0972 to reach the Chicago Botanic Garden Plant Information Service. Or you can bring a photo, cutting or the entire plant up to the walk-up window.

For more details see my article, "Chicago Botanic Garden Inspires Creativity" published in the November 2007 issue of The Herb Companion. (Not available online.) If you can't visit the Chicago Botanic Garden in person, take a virtual tour of the English Walled Garden with a 360-degree panoramic view.

Do you have a special place for "herban renewal"? A favorite public herb garden that you'd like to share with other readers? A fantastic herb festival? Please add your comment below.

Last week I was reading my favorite Herb Companion blogs Samurai Sage and The Herbalista. Editor-in-chief K.C. Compton’s post, At My Place: Spring Vegetable Gardening, and associate editor Allison Martin’s post, Kitchen Vegetable Gardening for Beginners, made me think of the various herbs, flowers and vegetables I wanted to grow in my own backyard. Shortly after, I took off to my local nursery.

I asked the owner of my local nursery for some advice and which plants they recommend for my area. The owner suggested a few books I should read, one of which was Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (Harper Collins Publishers, 2007) authored by Barbara Kingsolver and her family. I had already read this book last summer because I was so excited to pick seeds, watch things grow and become affectionate toward my garden.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle documents Barbara and her family’s year of eating local food from their own backyard, farmers’ markets and neighboring farms.

Barbara, her husband, Steven L. Hopp, and their two daughters, Camille and Lily, wrote the book as a family. Barbara wrote the main narrative while her husband contributed sidebars focused on the food industry and food production. Camille wrote about meal plans, seasonal recipes and important nutritional information. The youngest in the family, Lily, raised their chickens, turkeys and helped with the farm work.

This book is at the top of my “Favorite Books List” for a few reasons. First, I enjoy the concept of living off of the land and becoming a localvore. Since reading the book last summer, I’ve tried to eat local, in-season foods and grow my own handful of herbs. Second, I enjoyed the family's collaborative effort to follow through with their goal to eat locally produced food. The family proved that with enough planning and preparation, eating local doesn’t have to be limiting or expensive.

Here are a few tips from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle on becoming a localvore:

•  Eat in season. Find out what season your favorite produce grow in and plan accordingly—this will vary for each Zone.
•  Start a community garden or, if your community already has one, join in.
•  Attend farmer’s markets—who knew you could support local farmers while enjoying delicious, fresh foods!

Have you read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? Are you a localvore? If you have any tips or suggestions for eating local or growing your own food, let’s chat about it. Leave me a comment or send me an email at snelson@ogdenpubs.com.

Q: I started my first herb garden 13 years ago—I never had any trouble growing sage. My husband and I moved to a new house three years ago—each year, I plant sage, and it dies. Any ideas? 
– E.  Darnell

A: The fifth part in our “Herb 911” series is dedicated to sage (Salvia officinalis), member of Labiatae or the mint family. Sage is a great addition to the series, as the herb’s growing conditions are similar to other herbs in the series. Sage is a fairly resilient herb, so it can bear a trial-and-error gardening method. Like most herbs, sage is better when fresh, yet still good when frozen.

If you are planting seeds, it should germinate in temperatures that don’t drop below 60 degrees or go higher than 70 degrees. Also, growing sage seeds indoors with lots of light is more successful then leaving them outdoors as the sage germination period can be tricky. Keep overnight temperatures in mind if you plan on leaving seeds outdoors. A couple of weeks ago, I planted sage seeds in a pot. This past weekend, they were starting to come up when a spring cold front moved into the Denver area. I’m not sure what the damage is, but just in case I planted more seeds. If your sage plant is established, but still young, you have a little more leeway with the temperature—keep it about 55 degrees to 85 degrees. If your sage is an adult shrub, it can withstand -30 degrees winter temperatures, if properly covered.

Like rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis), also from the Labiatae family, sage prefers a light fertilizer and for the soil pH to be between 6.0 and 7.0. To measure the soil’s pH, you can buy a pH reader from your local garden store. Sage thrives in fairly rich soil that is well-drained. However, sage can tolerate droughts and poor soil conditions just like lavender.

The size of the plant will determine how much water it will need. Start with two cups of water every three days. Adjust this amount if you see mold or fungus at the base of the plant, which indicates too much water, or if the soil dries out.

There are many different types of sage: common (or garden) sage, pineapple sage (Salvia elegans), blue (or Cleveland) sage (S. clevelandii), broad leaf sage, clary (or muscatel) sage (S. scleria), golden sage (S. off. “Aurea”), purple sage (S. off. ‘Purpurea’) and tri-color sage (S. off. ‘Tricolor’).

Although these general growing conditions can be applied to the various types of sage, each variety has specific needs and purposes. Common sage is used primarily for cooking and is typically used in medicine as an antiseptic, a disinfectant and to help restore the liver and the digestive system. Clary or muscatel sage is occasionally mixed with Muscatel wine, and this variety prefers heavier soils and is not typically used for cooking. The tri-color sage can withstand 20 degree temperatures and is also used in culinary dishes. Diviners’ sage or sage of the seers (Salvia divinorum) is a psychoactive sage. This herb was used medicinally as a healing agent and for divination practices in some ancient cultures.

Photo by Narisa /Courtsey Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/narisa/

Tips for Keeping Sage Alive

There are many different variables for solving Darnell’s sage problem. Here are a few general tips and pointers.

• Don’t plant sage next to cucumbers or members of the onion family as they are not compatible plants. Incompatible plants can spread dominant flavors to another plant, causing it to loose original taste, can lead to an increased number of insects in your garden, or can lead to a decreased plant production.

• Sage has a difficult time germinating. Start your seeds indoors if the temperature is too cold outside. You can move your seeds outdoors after a month or two.

• Keep an 18- to 20-inch distance between sage and other plants when planted in a bed for root growth and bushiness of the plant.

• When planting sage in a garden, keep in mind that sage is compatible with tomatoes, rosemary, strawberries, carrots and marjoram among a few other plants. Plants that are companions often have similar growing habits and conditions.  

Do you have problems growing sage? What herbs do you have a difficult time growing? Let’s chat about it; drop me a comment or email me at snelson@ogdenpubs.com.